CHRIS NEWCOMB: Welcome to Peer Into Recovery, a podcast with a focus on the profession of peer support. For more information about how to subscribe, please visit our website at www.dprsn.org. Hey, everybody, welcome to another edition of Peer Into Recovery Podcast. I’m your host, Chris Newcomb.

Today, we’ve got a great guest. His name is Michael Lane. And Michael comes to us from Fairfax, Virginia, out there in Region 2. And he works at the Fairfax Falls Church CSB or Community Service Board. He’s the Division Director of Recovery Services there. Michael has a bachelor’s in drama, which could make this very interesting, from UC Irvine. And then also a master’s in organizational learning and effectiveness, which means this should be organizationally effective about being dramatic. And he holds that master’s from the University of the Pacific. And I probably shouldn’t laugh during all your credentials here. He also has a WRAP facilitator certification, as well as Certified Wellness Works Trainer, which is Support of Mental Health in the Workplace. Got that from Canada, actually, which is pretty interesting. And he is an NCPS, which is the National Certified Peer Specialist. Michael, how are you doing today?

MICHAEL LANE: Oh, fantastic. Great to be here, Chris. Thank you for the invitation. And by the way, I sometimes laugh at my own credentials. So I think one should sometimes.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Thank you, thank you. I feel better. My credential laughing guilt is gone. Yes, well, I’m glad you accepted and are here today to talk about all things peer support. So Michael, let’s go ahead and learn about you. We’ll get right to it. Tell us about your story of origin, you know, where you came from, and kind of your journey into being a peer. And then we’ll talk about how that led to what you’re doing professionally now.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Chris. I first became a peer specialist in 2011 in Sacramento, California. I’m originally from California. And, you know, of course what led there, like many, if not all of our listeners, there’s quite a journey that went on before. You know, things, you talk about childhood with various traumas, and dislocations and disconnections from family, friends, everything that went on before and led me to becoming homeless by the time I was 18. Wow. And I’ve been homeless four times in my life, both in very different places, including up in the mountains, in the suburbs, in a large city in San Francisco. And many times, learned a lot of different things, different places. And, you know, I was going in and out trying to figure out what was going on, you know, with my life. My, when I explained it, like when I was 18, it felt like a bomb went off my head. You know, in the movies, when you have a bomb goes off and like there’s this ringing and they can’t hear anything around them. And you’re like completely separated from the world around you. And it’s just like-

CHRIS NEWCOMB: It goes into slo-mo and then it goes shh.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: And they start falling.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah. And to me, that’s what it was like. It was like I just completely shut off from everything around me. I spent years trying to kind of recover from that to find out, what can I do? I tried a lot of different things. Many of them were not so healthy. As I got desperate for what was going to work, I included using substances of various sorts, eventually, which became a huge problem in my life as well. And I was in and out of trying and other things. I have a degree in drama. Well, theater and show business was worked for me in the middle of that, because I could hold it together for about three months to do, say, a show, right? So I could help for addition to rehearsal to performance to closing and I could hold it together that long. Not all the time, but sometimes. And then, boom, I was out. I was done. I was wiped out for a long period of time. And that kind of cycle continued, not just with the theater, but in general in life and unable to do anything. Hold down jobs for a little bit, fall out, go to school for a quarter, fall out for a year. And I think I counted up one time and I had like 10 different periods of going to school, of going to college.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Right. Well, you know, there’s a name that says, well, it’s a graphic that on the left side, it says success at the bottom and from the left corner to the top right is just a straight arrow. And then right to the next part of it is, it starts from the left corner and then does like 14 circles and a complete like just tangle. And then at the end of the tangle, it goes to the top right and it says actual success.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah, absolutely. It’s more like a squiggle, like a random squiggle.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yes, yes. 10 different times still got you to that top right corner. And with the Masters, I might add.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah, I mean, it was, what’s interesting, I’ll get to a second, but when I was, you know, by 2015, I had actually met every life goal that I’d ever thought I’d have plus some, because I actually never thought I would get anywhere close to where I am today. I thought if I could barely just get a bachelor’s degree, if I could just feel like I had a job, and maybe have a couple of relationships that were not completely toxic, that I would have made it in life. And so, but yeah, that’s in 2010, into 2011, I had was, there was a final period of homelessness. I had been, in 2008, I had kind of given up, because I tried and just tried and tried and tried, and I just completely bombed out of school, of UC Irvine, where I was studying drama. I went and studied abroad in England. That was super cool, still paying that off, but still paying that off.

Anyhow, that’s, and that’s, and then I just lost everything. I went from this high and just, and for three years, I just gave up. I was like, I can’t, I don’t have it in me anymore. It wasn’t until 2010 that I felt this, you know, kind of this calling within me, within my soul, within my heart, just saying, these different, you can do it again. I started looking around at the world around me. I was living in transitional housing, and, you know, that’s, which was, you know, you’re only, I wasn’t supposed to be there that long. And finally, I started making some changes in my life. Started kind of putting the pieces together, things that had kind of worked before, and adding some more things to it that didn’t work. So things like sleep hygiene, militant sleep hygiene, that was key for me. My own spiritual life, spiritual journey, doing a lot of spiritual readings, having, and then putting all the many pieces together so that I could have connections with other people.

So 2011, got first job as a Peer Recovery Specialist. Started volunteering first, just doing things, and then a full time job as a Peer Partner of the Mental Health of America of Northern California, which is now called CalVoices. Working in a mental health clinic. Yeah, worked there three years. Went back to school to finish six months of getting a bachelor’s degree.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Let me ask you, let me ask you this. How did it feel for you? You’ve been through four periods of homelessness and you walk across the stage to get your degree. How did that feel?

MICHAEL LANE: One of the weird things like no one out there really knows what went into it to get there. You know, there’s a few people, you know, a very few people knew what was went into it. I think that so much so often we, for many people, that you get something you achieve, and nobody knows what happened to get there. The grief, the pain, the struggle, the, you know, all the disconnection. And it was fine, like, wow, I achieved this. And I’d also met somebody who was a very healthy relationship. I’d gotten married, married in 2012. I never thought, I thought, you know, it would be a long time before I’d be healthy enough to get married. Or I had a child, you know, I never thought I’d have children of my own. I, that’s, it was, but it was like, it was surreal because like, okay, now what? I have everything I ever dreamed of and I have things I’ve never dreamed of, you know, that, but it was, it was terrific. And it was, yeah.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: I would say it might have, might have been a, you know, it could have been a catalyst or launching point for I, I rose up and I’m resilient and I’m here to stay, you know, you know, I don’t know if that’s exactly how you felt. The reason I say that is, is I’m a first-generation college graduate. And it took me five years to do my undergrad. And when I walked through and got that degree, one of the things I felt was no one can take this from me. This is permanent.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: And I could always look back at that as a reference point. If I started to sense like, oh, you know, you’re not all that smart about this or that. And I just look at the wall and go, really? A governing body decided you were.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah. It was, you know, those, you know, you have different goals in life, and some of them you get a certificate with, and some of them you don’t get a certificate. Yeah. There’s a lot of times there are, you know, kind of tangible things, and it was, it also helps me to remember that some of the miracles are possible when I’m talking to someone, or maybe to somebody who is just, everything is going south. Like, why? What’s going on in your life? Oh my gosh. That some of the folks are like, oh, they’ll never make it. They can’t, they’re not ready or whatnot. That’s all those things we talk about people about. And I was like, yeah, I was there, too.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: And here I am, and that was, and that the power of being a peer, because we speak from authority of our lived experience. And every picture tells a story, but it doesn’t tell every story. When talking to you, I was not thinking, well, I can’t wait till it gets to the part about being homeless four times. Like that did not present to me. And not that it should or shouldn’t, it’s just that’s the power of being a peer, is that we delve into story. And as you know, as someone with a vast experience and even education in drama, we are a people of story, culturally, musically, theater, books. As humans, we love story. And most of us love to come from behind story.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah, we do. And that’s really, I think all of us are coming from behind when we are another. And it’s just you talk about theater and story. When I actually got into being a peer specialist, I was like, hey, do I want to do this or we want to go back and do theater? And I actually started a theater company, Sacramento. And it was, and we were basically was working with theater professionals. Plus, and I started out telling, getting a tiny little micro grant. That’s one reason why micro grants is an idea I had for the Year of the Peer. That from an arts commission in Sacramento, it was like $2,000, which was amazing. But it was to direct a show about mental health in Sacramento and to create one. I went around and started doing all these story circles. And I told myself, I am going to do this. And then I’m going to go around to all these groups and all these people. And then somebody is going to give me a job at working in this field. And that’s the stupidest plan on Earth.

It worked. It worked. I went around, I was going to all these board meetings, committee meetings. I was going to organizations. Eventually, someone said, hey, there’s this job you should apply for it. And darn if it didn’t work. But the first show I directed was called Sacramento. It was about, and it was, yeah. I love it. And it was great. I had some people who were impacted themselves and were mental health conditions. And then some people who are theater professionals who maybe weren’t performing side by side. And we kind of wrote and told the story together.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah.

MICHAEL LANE: And performed it in a theater. Did one more piece after that, called When the Colors Come Back. And it was commissioned to play from somebody that had serious mental health challenges the whole life, a writer. And it was back, you know, when the colors come back, that’s what he described to him. When kind of finding recovery. And so I did those two things. And then I realized I was paying everybody with myself. And I had to make, and plus I was, you know, trying to, I was like going to start a family, which I never expected. And I was like, I can’t work full time and do this other thing, do the theater and be able to present. So I decided, you know, I’m just going to let that, I’m going to set that down gently and lovingly. Yeah. And into this new field I was in.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: I like that when you said, set it down gently and lovingly. And you know, what a gift it is to be able to follow a dream and to be able to see some of it come to fruition in whatever shape or form. You know, that’s a powerful thing. And so to our listeners, if you have a dream and you gave up on that dream, maybe you set it down for a time, for whatever reason, and there’s no judgment on any of that, you can pick that dream back up and you can follow it and you can chase it. Or maybe you’re on it, going to it right now, keep going, keep going.

MICHAEL LANE: And for me that there were, depending on what I’ve said, downgrades for that one, it was a, hey, I found something that I didn’t know was there before. And I started to have a new relationship with the arts that was in its role in my life. And sometimes I do pick it up for a moment here and there and enjoy it. But there’s a lot of other things that I do, and I’m able to have creativity in my work now.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: So tell us a little bit about what you do now at the Fairfax Falls Church CSB, and you’re working there as the Division Director of Recovery Services.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah, one of the exciting things about it is that we have so much peer support work and so many peer recovery specialists. And yeah, when I, we have just working for the CSB, we have between 40 to 50 with our partners. We have another 40 to 50 more, depending on how you count it, including if you’re including volunteers and things like that. And I work with a great leadership team, including Diana Taylor and Cynthia Evans. Cynthia Evans, so those are the two on my, yeah, yeah. Those two, I could not do the work without them. I was so grateful for Diana to come up from Richmond.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Actually, Diana was one of the facilitators for my WRAP training.

MICHAEL LANE: Right on.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: So it was Carla Heath, if you know her.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so they’re terrific. And together, really, what we lead is, I oversee some programs directly. That’s kind of under my line. That’s overseeing the manager. Diana oversees supervisors, oversees a few programs, including our peer outreach response team, responding to overdoses, are striving to achieve recovery peer team, which is operates in our adult detention center, which operates a recovery unit with the sheriff’s office, our new peer mental health navigation program, which we’re operating. In addition to the other, those are the ones I have the closest involvement with than I consult with, like another 10 programs and helping coordinate the peer support work and making sure peer specialists are supported. In addition to that, also overseeing peer support contracts, so contracts we have. So I oversee the contract for our four recovery centers, which is done through RPSV Recovery Program Solutions of Virginia. A couple of contracts with the Chris Atwood Foundation we have for delivering services including a program in our adult detention center, which peer GL reentry. They were awarded a new contract to open up a recovery center, a recovery community center, and they’re working on finding a location for that.

So we’re seeing that and there’s some other ones too, which we oversee. And so it’s kind of helping to make sure that we’re following recovery principles and we’re following what peer support is all about. Because as we all know, it’s very easy to drift. And I won’t say we’re perfect. And sometimes it can feel like whack-a-mole, but what we try to do is find ways to support peer recovery specialists, support program leadership. And I get to, I’m one of the division directors at the CSB. And this is one of the things that I think, one of the reasons I came here from California is because rarely do people in this type of position get to operate at that high a level, where you’re operating at the same level as the person who is running all the residential services, as the person who’s running all the emergency services, as you’re seeing all the clinicians and serving on those teams, and reporting to the same people who are doing all that. Oftentimes, it’s usually a step lower or two. So that’s a gift. And really, I feel I get a lot of respect from people who are serving in those positions, where we are really respected as Peer Recovery Specialists, not just that, oh, you’re that weird guy. Yeah, that weird guy, you’re doing that thing, you don’t really know what you’re talking about. I’m sure that you get that occasionally. Sometimes, you know, there’s drama, dude. So sometimes we need a little more drama in our life. It’s getting boring.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Exactly. Yeah, for sure.

MICHAEL LANE: So that’s what I do. And there’s a lot involved in it. You know, it’s identifying trainings. There’s just the day-to-day stuff of, you know, invoices and trying to do RFPs for contracts and reviewing them. And then there’s the kind of figure out the staffing challenges and all that, which is, you know, like everybody else, we have them. So, and then trying to, you know, connect Peer Recovery Specialists together the way I can. And there’s the pandemic interrupted all many of those efforts that, like it did for so many people. I mean, we’re hardly unique in that. We’re trying to kind of get back to that. That’s what I do now.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Awesome. And you mentioned RFP for our listeners. That stands for really fun people. Yeah.

MICHAEL LANE: Oh, I wish. It’s usually the opposite, but with all due respect to people who work in procurement, but request for proposals. So like when you’re doing like a grant or you say, hey, we want, we have this, we did it with the recovery centers, for example, put it out there, say, we want people to run these several recovery centers. Organizations give us your proposal about how you’re going to do that, how you’re going to pay for it, and it’s hundreds of pages long.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Wow.

MICHAEL LANE: And that they’ve got to turn in because it’s, hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Where you are, that they’re going for, and there’s so many rules and laws and regulations, and I got to work with the people and go, why can’t we do that? I’m going to go to jail. I guess we won’t do that.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: I was going to say, just make sure you don’t go buy the Lamborghini, they will find you.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. Somewhat of it is just kind of a little details, and now mostly it’s, you know, because just want to make sure everybody set up for success and things are fair and equitable.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Well, you know, it’s kind of what you were saying, you know, leadership is about serving the people that work, you know, with you and for you, but it’s also, you know, being able to jump in when needed, and what sounds really great about, you know, your philosophy is that you’re making sure that you maintain that that base of I’m a peer first, and then that informs how I see the outcomes of what I’m doing, because there are people’s lives who are being changed through the services we’re giving. And then operationally, you know, you’re making sure that those things all, you know, eyes are dotted and T’s are crossed, so that the best chance for healing occurs. Is that accurate?

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah, I would say so. And when some of that what that might look like, kind of in practical terms is when like designing a new program, doing program development. Okay, how do you do it? You can just do it kind of the standard way. But, you know, going back to what my kind of philosophy or why I got into this, one of the reasons why I was working as a peer specialist, like, okay, what do I want to do? How do I want to grow? And I, you know, there’s many people go the route that we go to get a master’s degree in counseling, they come a clinician or what not, and I realized that I didn’t want to do that, but I was noticing so many behavioral health organizations, peer organizations, and also just standard ones were so unhealthy. And also the services were so mismatched between what people really needed. And so that’s why I got the master’s degree I did. Because some of my specialties were in design thinking, which is really, you know, how things like the iPhone invented.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Yeah.

MICHAEL LANE: You know, things like that. Yeah, those sort of approaches, which people didn’t even know that they wanted it.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Until they…

MICHAEL LANE: It tapped into something they really need until it was there. People like, you know, I don’t really need that. You know, what’s this computer in a pocket? You know, what people before you think about 2000, nobody knew that they needed or wanted that. Yeah, but really tapping into what people really need, not just always what people… And so you can do things that are not just incremental. So what that looks like is like doing journey mapping, where you’re doing a lot of deep empathy, like developing a persona for somebody who’s coming in for our services. And we did this recently with designing our peer mental health navigation. So somebody is coming in, what’s going on in their lives? Like, let’s call him Jeremy. What’s going on in Jeremy’s life that he’s getting in fights with his brother all the time, his brother wants to kick him out of the house, unless he gets treatment. He’s coming in because his brother told him to, also he’s like, maybe I’ll try it this time. But he keeps getting in fights with his brother, he’s getting kicked out, he’s becoming homeless and really connecting with, it’s not about him showing up.

Sometimes it’s not about his bipolar disorder sometimes, the substance use, it’s about really what’s going on for him as a person and connecting with not just what he shows up with, understanding before he comes back, what’s going, maybe going on in his life, before he would come on and really trying to penetrate some of the barriers, and he’s feeling frustrated and angry and hopeless, and all those sorts of things, really spending a lot of time with that, designing around those things, not designing around the DSM criteria, or levels of care that you have available, and really kind of looking at. And so that’s what I studied, those sorts of things and other specialties to really get that how can organizations be more effective and be healthier. And so that’s what I try to connect to often is when we’re getting into this bureaucratic mess, which I’m in all the time, is finding opportunities to do that sort of thing. Very few people in behavioral health have that sort of training or background. And that’s why it’s like I find your niche, you know, that’s completely different than anybody else.

And just yesterday I was in a meeting that included like emergency room physicians, included people from various programs in the Fairfax County, included fire and rescue folks. And we’re all looking at the youth overdose crisis and trying to, and it’s all the high level people trying to figure out an answer. What can we do about youth? We don’t have any place to send people. And everyone’s kind of swirling around, it’s like, hey, let’s get up and like map this. And let’s like hop out and people who know me know, I love a whiteboard, like literally get up, okay, let’s develop these profiles. And where are all these things we’re just talking about? When you get something up there visually, so people are looking at it, it can cut through a lot of crap. You can sit there and just talk your way around a circle for an hour. Or, and pardon me, yeah, I hope that’s not exactly cussing, but you cut through a lot of stuff. And people are like, it completely changed the conversation. Because that is, now we’re talking about kind of mapping stuff, not just talking around in a circle with 12 people who are all frustrated. And that is, and it was, it completely changed what we were, how we were going to approach the problem. And, you know, it was, it’s not a genius, it’s much of circles and lines on a whiteboard. But if it’s not where your training lends you to think about, you don’t go to it early, early on.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Well, to bring it all back full circle, we’ve been on a journey this morning of sorts, mapping out your story as a peer, and then moving into becoming a peer recovery specialist. And now the work that you’re doing as division director there at the Fairfax Falls Church Community Service Board. I’m going to be a little cheesy here, and I’m going to use that journey mapping as a segue, or a segue, into talking about arts and music, and as it relates to Year of the Peer. So for those of you who are listening, you probably have heard of this movement that’s been going on in 2023 called Year of the Peer. And Michael Lane came up with that idea, and so we’re going to hear how that came to be.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah. Let me start by saying, I might have come up with the idea, but I’m doing very little of the actual work for it. There’s a huge number of people who are working, who are doing amazing stuff to make this happen. It was October 2021, and there’s the Peer Recovery Specialist stakeholder Roundtable. It’s a monthly meeting of Peer Recovery Specialists and others, especially in leadership roles that meet from around the state in Virginia. I had this idea and I had been thinking a long time about, okay, what do we need? I was thinking through different, one of the things I like is called the Four Frames from Bowman and Deal and Google it, everyone. But that’s…

CHRIS NEWCOMB: What was that again? The Four Frames?

MICHAEL LANE: The Four Frames by Bowman and Deal. And basically, it’s four different frames of looking at a problem. And I’ve taught this to the Recovery leadership academy as well. Okay. Where you have these different frames, you look at the structural framework, how it operates as a machine, you look at the family, you kind of resource what you call the human one, where it’s like how things are interacted as a family, you looked at kind of the political, the power dynamics, and you look at kind of symbolic, you know, kind of framework which oftentimes, you know, the metaphor is like a circus or a temple, something like that. Kind of going through like, what do we really need? I realized that people really need to, after the pandemic, to come together. And also, like so much of what we’ve done, so much in Virginia has grown hugely. And there’s so many strides, and there’s so much further to go. But to really have a time, you kind of focus in on and celebrate, and really kind of bring those, bring that success together, and kind of create a new foundation around it, and something as simple that people can understand, and just popped in my head, Year of the Peer.

I thought, wow, what if we had a whole year just of celebration about peer recovery specialists? And it kind of like popped in my head, and the various components of it, that we’d have things like a proclamation. And I understand that’s the governor’s working out and doing that. We’d announce a year of the peer, we’d have events that are happening in the statewide level, also locally or regionally, and that we have micro-grants, any grants to support some organizations who wouldn’t be able to do something like that otherwise. Especially like in rural areas, other places that are a lot more cash-strapped, a lot harder to do that. That we have opportunities for bringing people together, that we have promotional activities like videos that are produced. They were really encouraging people to celebrate together. We have a conference and those are all things that I created, I think four slides, three or four slides, and pitched it. Say, hey guys, I got this idea and I knew the only way this is going to happen is a bunch of people would have to get on board. Three out of four times you pitch an idea, as you know, you can get it. Okay, thanks. We’re moving on to the next person. Oh, wow.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: It’s Friday at lunch. Yeah.

MICHAEL LANE: Most ideas don’t go. For some reason, I know, but it really resonated with people. Wow, we really want to do this. In 2022, we needed to, in 2021, this is going to take a long time to prepare. But also, this is something I couldn’t do on my own. If a lot of people were interested, we could do something. A lot of people weren’t, and that’s cool, but I’m not going to try to force the issue. And I had some stuff in early 2022, kind of going around in my personal life and others, just kind of that I was not able to really give any energy to kind of convene people together. It was getting to be the middle of, you know, 2022 and some other things were kind of smoothing out. And then I had a conversation with Mark Blackwell, who says, you know, people who are talking about this, let’s do this thing. Mark Blackwell, the Director of the Office of Recovery Services, let’s do this thing. I want to put some resources. I want to put some, get our team on, let’s do this.

And he started really leading the and leading this and really kind of influencing people very strongly to make this happen. And really, it did take financial resources. And so his office making many tens of thousands of dollars, he would have to tell you like perhaps over $100,000 available around the state to do these various activities. So we were able to do micro grants, which we have awarded 10 around the state. We were producing videos, which are going to not just be good for you, the peer, but lasting for a while. There are two conferences put on with Roads to Recovery and Vocal Virginia are putting on these conferences. There’s Swag, PeerGear, that’s called it. There’s a logo, which a great team from, including Robin Hantelman, Jelma Harris, Shreya Walker, and I’m going to miss the other names that designed and they developed a toolkit to help people to be able to celebrate that and have tools to do that. The logo has got a lot of symbolism to it. It’s a cool logo.

Really, people started putting things together and then we’re like, okay, we got to organize this thing. I told Mark, I just can’t be overall. I know it’s my idea and usually if you have an idea, you’re volunteering yourself to delete it. I just can’t. You heard all the things that are going on, but really started coming together and some things came together fairly quickly. I think it’s beautiful that we’re able to celebrate. It is the Year of the Peer.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: We’re here. To our listeners, this is the Year of the Peer. And 2023 is moving with momentum statewide and every locale, celebrating being a peer. For those who are on the way to becoming a peer, come on in. There’s plenty of room. And I want to thank our guest Michael Lane for being here. Again, he’s the Division Director of Recovery Services there in Fairfax, Region 2 at the Fairfax Falls Church Community Service Board. And Michael, thanks so much for being here.

MICHAEL LANE: Yeah, you’re welcome. And thank you, Chris, and happy Year of the Peer.

CHRIS NEWCOMB: Amen to that. I want to thank our listeners for listening to the Peer Into Recovery Podcast, which is brought to you by the Virginia Peer Specialist Network and Mental Health America of Virginia. And if you like our show and would like to subscribe to the podcast, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. And please leave us a brief review on iTunes. In the meantime, please take care of yourselves, everyone. We’ll see you soon.